The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
With present day commercial aircraft, the flight crew must assess the technical status of the aircraft based on a collection and review of physically separate and/or generally unorganized information. Currently, pre-flight technical status information is typically spread out between paper logbooks (technical logs, cabin logs, deferred items logs), flight release and maintenance release paperwork (often dot-matrix printed paper tear-off reports), and flight plans provided by dispatch. From all of this information, the user, for example a pilot or co-pilot, must be able to identify current information relevant to the flight mission that he/she is about to perform. As will be appreciated, this can be challenging for the flight crew, especially in view of the plurality of different information sources (i.e., different log books and paper reports) that the flight crew is required to handle during the pre-flight review process.
Currently many maintenance history systems (ground based maintenance information systems) provide a “maintenance release” function which generates a maintenance release document, known in the industry as a “MRD”. The MRD includes a summary of the technical status of the aircraft including servicing, deferred items and operating restrictions and maintenance actions since the last release of the aircraft. Often the flight crew is beginning the process of preparing for a flight prior to a MRD being created.
Once a paper MRD is created, subsequent review of the MRD does not necessarily ensure the validity of the report at the time of review. For example, in some instances defects may be detected and/or maintenance actions or servicing may be performed following creation of the MRD, rendering the paper report obsolete.